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By Leith van Onselen With Sydney’s population projected to surge to around 8 million people by mid-century: The NSW Government has today promised a more livable city, whereby residents can get to where they need to go in just 30-minutes. From The AFR: Planners envisage that by the middle of this century most Sydneysiders will

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By Leith van Onselen The federal government’s 457 temporary ‘skilled’ visa program ended on 18 March, and will now be replaced by the Temporary Skill Shortage (TSS) visa. A component of the Temporary Skilled Visa will be the Global Talent Scheme (GTS), which is a trial program that will commence in July and initially run

By Leith van Onselen With New Zealand’s Labour-led coalition Government nearly six months old, Roy Morgan has released new polling showing that poverty and housing are now the primary concerns of New Zealand voters: Quantified thematic analysis of the verbatim responses of a nationally representative sample of 999 New Zealanders found the economy and things

By Leith van Onselen Saturday’s elections were disastrous for The Greens. After heading into Melbourne’s Batman by-election with a 6-point lead over Labor, preliminary results have Labor winning the seat with a 55% to 45% two-party preferred lead: The result was labelled a disaster by Greens leader Richard DiNatale, who blamed the ‘shock’ defeat on

So says Rystad Energy: “Shale is not dead, shale is reborn and has strong growth potential [even] at $US40 to $US50 oil,” said chief executive Jarand Rystad at the opening of the firm’s Sydney office. “It has the potential to again crush the oil market.” Rystad, one of the few to correctly forecast that US

Via Jess Irvine on the Banking Royal Commission: NAB’s dubious practice of paying third party “introducers” – including gym owners and tailors – large fees for referring potential customers to its bankers was exposed at length by Orr last week. But arguably the most glaring instance of incentives gone wrong in the mortgage market is

By Leith van Onselen Over the past year or so, I have ridiculed the new found push by some politicians towards decentralisation, noting that this is a pipe dream based on the settlement pattern of new migrants, which have overwhelmingly chosen to flood the major cities. My view was initially based primarily on data from

Via The Fake Left: The Turnbull government is one step closer to being able to implement its proposed national energy guarantee, courtesy of Jay Weatherill’s departure as the South Australian premier after Saturday’s state election. Weatherill led the resistance at the state level to the Turnbull proposal, which will impose new reliability and emissions reduction guarantees on energy retailers

By Chris Becker Risk markets are at a critical point here with the turmoil in the White House looming over the end of the latest business and earnings cycle, as a multitude of bubbles and overcooked asset markets are causing huge hesitation for investors. Treasury yields remain elevated, while US stock markets cannot make good

Via MIT: Carnegie Institution, calculated that the world would need to add about a nuclear power plant’s worth of clean-energy capacity every day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. Recently, he did a quick calculation to see how we’re doing. Not well. Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per

Paul Kelly makes plenty of sense today: The old empires are striking back. The hubris and limits of the minor parties are starkly revealed with the Liberals coming to power in South Australia, Labor’s victory in Batman, the Greens denied in a seat they aspired to win and the Nick Xenophon bubble in a long-overdue implosion. …Xenophon’s

By Leith van Onselen The Grattan Institute’s latest housing report explicitly stated that if Australia cannot build enough housing and infrastructure to keep pace with population growth, then the pragmatic thing to do is cut immigration, thereby relieving demand. On Friday, the Urban Development Institute of Australia’s (UDIA) Victorian branch admitted that the building industry is

Via Domainfax: The Fair Work Ombudsman will investigate companies offering unpaid internships for which some students paid $1000, following a report by Fairfax Media. The Ombudsman, Natalie James, said the report raised “serious questions” about the internships hosted by web developer Future Squared and recruitment by Industry Placements Australia. Some graduates paid a $990 “administration

Via UBS: ‘Macro-pru’ has been more effective than expected The 2nd round of APRA’s macroprudential policy tightening (announced Mar-17) to limit investor credit growth to “comfortably below 10%” & interest only loans to 30% of flow has arguably been even more effective than either APRA or the RBA expected. Loan data released this week for

The Australian dollar was battered to 2018 closing lows Friday night: It still has room to fall before violating the uptrend in the mid-75 cent range, though I think it will break it this year. In fact, the Aussie was crushed on the crosses too. Against DMs: And EMs: Sentiment appears to be breaking down.

CoreLogic released its auction report yesterday, which reported a largely stable preliminary national auction clearance rate – i.e. 67.5% this week compared to 67.3% last week (later revised down to 63.3%). The preliminary clearance rate was also well below the 74.1% recorded in the same weekend of last year: Auction volumes nationally were at at

I am yet to meet an oil and gas bear. BofAML is typical: More projects likely to get off the ground this year We view the prospects for the US liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector as largely positive. We expect a number of final investment decisions (FIDs) this year as we move closer to meeting

Iron ore prices for March 16, 2018: Tianjin benchmark fell $1.90 to $69.60. Paper fell further overnight. Steel was stable. Coking coal did better. Westpac has a an excellent note out on steel and iron ore: Westpac has revised its near term forecasts for iron ore and met coal, holding them around current levels to

Another mixed session to end the week here in Asia with most stock markets putting in scratch sessions or minor losses as markets continued to contemplate the changes in personnel at the White House amid growing concerns the Federal Reserve will raise rates again next week. Commodities were little changed while bond yields dropped slightly.

By William Bourke, President of Sustainable Australia: Population is “the everything issue”. It affects all aspects of public policy and our daily lives. It is essential to get population policy right if we are to achieve critical public policy outcomes like secure jobs, affordable housing, better planning and a sustainable environment. That is not to say

Via The Australian comes Saul Eslake: “Some of them I think will be at least partly compensated by an increase in their part pension, but the Labor Party could if they wanted to, and I’m not an adviser to them, this is for them to work out, but they could for example say that anyone

The AUD is taking some pain today: As bonds are firmly bid: While short-end spreads have crashed to below 30bps versus the US: XJO is up: Mainly chasing the Big Iron bounce: Dalian is soft: Big Oil too: Big Gold still looks vulnerable: Big Sleazy is getting a royal commission reaming: Big Puswad is all

From the Australian Industry Group: “On behalf of Hair and Beauty Australia (HABA), Ai Group Workplace Lawyers has filed submissions and evidence in the Fair Work Commission’s Hair and Beauty Industry Penalty Rates Case on behalf of the employers in the industry,” Australian Industry Group Chief Executive, Innes Willox, said today. “In the Fair Work Commission’s major Penalty

Damien Boey at Credit Suisse: Equities underperforming bonds For all the negative sentiment towards bonds in the marketplace (eg because of inflation, or policy tightening concerns), it is interesting to note that in China, and in Australia, equities have actually underperformed bonds year-to-date. In a previous article (attached), we argued that these developments are no

Via Cameron Kusher: Earlier this week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released its monthly housing finance data for January 2018 while the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) released their quarterly ADI property exposures data for December 2017. Each of these releases provide really valuable insight into the state of the mortgage lending environment. Firstly

By Leith van Onselen In June last year, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) launched consultation to have debt-to-income (DTI) limits added to its macro-prudential toolkit. In the consultation paper, the RBNZ proposed a DTI limit of 5.0 times incomes and noted that DTI limits are used in other markets around the world, including the

From deputy governor Guy Debelle today: Today I am going to talk about some issues around risk and return in a low rate environment, in line with the theme of the conference. I am going to highlight questions that strike me as worth asking about the way return and risk are reflected in the current

Via Reneweconomy: The South Australia state government is to provide a $10 million loan to help UK billionaire Sanjeev Gupta trump fellow US billionaire Elon Musk and build an even bigger battery at Port Whyalla. Gupta’s SIMEC ZEN Energy is intending to build a 120MW/140MWh – as revealed in RenewEconomy earlier this week when we wrote of